A Door Closes — and Opens — for Dominic Thiem

Remember when Novak Djokovic lost to Stefanos Tsitsipas in Toronto? At that precise moment, how many tennis fans felt confident about Djokovic’s U.S. Open prospects? Maybe a lot — or more precisely, maybe a lot more than the loss might have suggested.

We know that even the best players have “off days.” We also know that for the elite players, especially the Big 3, losses are constantly shrugged off. The legends regularly manage to find their game at the majors and summon their best stuff when it really counts. Yet, Djokovic’s 2018 season was marked by so many bumps in the road — and his memorable semifinal win over Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon was reflective of that pattern — to the point that one could have viewed his loss to Tsitsipas as cause for concern. Even in Cincinnati, Djokovic did not play great tennis for most of the week…

… but he survived.

Then, in the semifinals against Marin Cilic and especially in the final against Roger Federer, he feasted. The dominant force who put the rest of men’s tennis at his feet in 2015 and the first half of 2016 returned. That player was then seen in New York, clobbering Kei Nishikori and Juan Martin del Potro on Championship Weekend at the U.S. Open to bag major title No. 14, tying Pete Sampras.

The point of this Djokovic story: The loss in Toronto was not an alarm bell. It was an early exit which made winning his first Cincinnati title a much more realistic proposition. Had Djokovic beaten Tsitsipas and played deep into Toronto, the idea of winning six matches the next week in Ohio would have been much harder to buy. Winning Cincy, and beating Federer in the final there after three losses to the Swiss in the same situation, fueled Djokovic for the U.S. Open.

A loss represents, in an immediate sense, the closing of a door at one tennis tournament… but great players can turn that closing of a door into an opening somewhere else. Djokovic did that.

Now Dominic Thiem can do the same.

Thiem was pushed out of the Shanghai Masters in his first match on Tuesday, losing to fast-court formula finder Matthew Ebden. The Australian pushed Roger Federer on Halle grass earlier this year. He very nearly beat Kevin Anderson in the Tokyo indoor stop last week. He carried that form into China and left Thiem “Shanghaied.”

Anyone who follows men’s tennis was interested in how Thiem would fare on a faster hardcourt surface. He didn’t play poorly in this match, but he ran into a hot player. That happens. Thiem — who dismantled the once-reasonable notion that he is a clay-court specialist with his U.S. Open run and his performance against Nadal in the quarterfinals — cannot be viewed dimly after this loss. His level of play didn’t warrant such a cruel verdict.

The key for the Austrian is — like Djokovic when traveling from Toronto to Cincinnati — to enable the closing of one door to lead to an opening of another.

The brief stay in Shanghai enables Thiem to go back to Europe and gear up for the indoor stretch run to the season. Of note is the looming double possibility that both Nadal and Roger Federer will both skip Bercy. Maybe one will play, but probably not both, and even if both do play, they are unlikely to be at their best. Federer, to be blunt, probably has to lose early in Basel to even consider playing Bercy before the ATP Finals, and even then, he might skip France to prepare for London. Nadal doesn’t have a Davis Cup Final to prepare for since Spain lost to France, but with the 2019 Australian Open down the road, he might choose (wisely in my mind) to reduce hardcourt strain on his knees and not include Bercy on his schedule. Again, even if Nadal plays in Paris, one should not expect him to be in top form.

You can see where this is going: If Jack Sock and Filip Krajinovic could meet in the 2017 Bercy final, it is more than realistic for Thiem — having not overplayed the past few weeks — to make a deep run in Bercy. Avoiding Djokovic in the quarterfinals will be important, but assuming the 25-year-old gets that bit of luck in the draw, this could be the hardcourt Masters event he can pounce on.

It is worth noting that Thiem might need Bercy for ATP Race to London points. Should Kei Nishikori and/or John Isner do well in the coming weeks (though Isner isn’t playing Shanghai, which cripples his push for London), Thiem will need to get at least some work done to maintain his No. 8 position. To that extent, Bercy figures to matter for him.

Yet, I would submit the view that winning a hardcourt Masters 1000 title would matter a lot more than punching a ticket to the O2 Arena in November. Tasting success at a high-point hardcourt event would represent a bigger prize than getting to London and losing in the round-robin stage. A Bercy title, or even a final — given that such an achievement would come within the confines of regular tour play (whereas the year-end championships are a separate, standalone event in their structure) — might boost Thiem’s hopes for 2019 in ways that the ATP Finals might not.

Dominic Thiem has no reason to hang his head. One door closed in Shanghai, but another could open in Paris… if he is ready for the challenge.

Matt Zemek is the co-editor of Tennis With An Accent with Saqib Ali. Matt is the lead writer for the site and helps Saqib with the TWAA podcast, produced by Radio Influence at radioinfluence.com. Matt has written professionally about men's and women's tennis since 2014 for multiple outlets: Comeback Media, FanRagSports, and independently at Patreon, where he maintains a tennis site. You can reach Matt by e-mail: mzemek@hotmail.com. You can find him on Twitter at @mzemek.

Roughly one-third of a century before Soderling, there was an even better version of him in men’s tennis, at least if we are talking strictly about on-court results and significant titles.

Soderling carved out a career rich in accomplishments and historic match victories. That career was cut short by health problems, but when Soderling played, he reached a considerable height. He didn’t become an iconic player, but his story will be more than a tiny footnote in his era, 50 years from now.

Younger generations of tennis fans are firmly aware of Soderling’s place in the history of the sport. In the 1970s, Adriano Panatta forged a very similar level of standing in men’s tennis.

We know that Soderling is one of only two men to ever beat Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros. Soderling also stopped Roger Federer’s legendary streak of 23 straight major-tournament semifinals reached with his win in 2010, one year after the earth-shaking upset of Nadal.

Panatta can boast of accomplishments which match the Soderling double in Paris: Panatta was the only man to beat Bjorn Borg at the French Open, and much as Soderling scored his two most historic wins in Paris, Panatta did as well. He beat Borg twice.

Panatta, though, took a few extra steps that Soderling wasn’t able to manage. Panatta won Roland Garros after his second win over Borg in 1976. In that same year, Panatta carried Italy to its first and still only Davis Cup championship. Panatta won three points in the Italians’ 4-1 win over Chile in the Davis Cup Final.

Panatta — in addition to his conquests of Borg, his major title at the French, and his Davis Cup triumph — played in one of the most memorable matches in U.S. Open history.

In 1978, the first year of the tournament’s existence on hardcourts at the current USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows (after decades on the grass and then Har-Tru green clay courts of Forest Hills), Panatta engaged Jimmy Connors in a riveting five-set duel. In the 12th game of the fifth set — in the one major tournament which used a fifth-set tiebreaker at the time — Panatta could only watch as Connors hit one of the most remarkable shots in tennis history.

Panatta’s quality shines through not only in that match, but in the fact that this elite clay-court player was able to test Connors on U.S. Open hardcourts and make the Wimbledon quarterfinals. He struggled on grass but did not allow his struggles to permanently handcuff him on that surface. He displayed an ability to adjust to different circumstances and handle the pressure of competition, allowing his talent to emerge in full flower.

Panatta is, in many ways, the embodiment of what a modern-day Italian talent — Fabio Fognini — always had the ability to be, but has never managed to become.

Adriano Panatta is one of several players from the 1970s who will not be remembered by the global community of tennis fans the same way the giants of the period will continue to be. No, Panatta won’t be spoken of in the same breath as Connors and Borg and McEnroe, much as Soderling lives in the shadows of today’s Big 3 plus Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka.

Nevertheless, like Soderling, Panatta’s best moments ripple through the pages of time. He is a player — with several contemporaries from the 1970s — whose accomplishments and enduring quality should not be forgotten.

Marin Cilic Knows The Sunshine As Well As The Shadow

It is not easy to concisely summarize many athletes’ careers — not when those careers defy a neat and tidy form of categorization.

What does one say about Gilles Simon, so dogged and relentless yet prone to lapses in concentration? What does one say about Marius Copil, so clearly talented yet only beginning to (potentially) find his range and rhythm on a sustained basis as a professional?

Even the Big 3 are not easy to process — not in relationship to each other. Alone, their stories might be able to be digested and explained with great clarity, but in connection to their two great rivals, each man in that trio becomes a much more layered mystery. If the Big 3 were easy to define as a group, fans would not debate their levels of greatness to the extent they do.

At various tiers of men’s tennis, making sense of a career is not simple.

Of any prominent ATP career this century, few are harder to grasp than Marin Cilic, the king of complexity.

I hasten to say at the outset: Complexity is not bad. Complexity is part of life. Complexity invites us to not settle for the easy conclusion if the reality of a situation demands a more layered assessment.

So it is with Cilic, who helped Croatia win a Davis Cup for the first time in 2018, culminating in his two-point tie on the opponent’s soil against France. As I wrote on Sunday — and as I always stress with Davis Cup — this is not something to check off on a laundry list, a “to-do item” one coldly eliminates in a businesslike manner. This is a moment of profound national meaning for Croatia, especially since it was the last Davis Cup, and even more particularly because earlier in 2018, France had defeated Croatia in the World Cup Final. It meant a lot to the whole Croatian team to win the global championship in another sport. The fact that France happened to be the last obstacle was a bonus — for Cilic, and Borna Coric, and everyone else.

Yet, while this is a team competition, let’s not pretend that of the many dramatis personae in Lille, France, Cilic stood above them. His gut-wrenching loss to Juan Martin del Potro in the 2016 Davis Cup Final against Argentina was supremely shattering. Carrying that scar isn’t easy to do for athletes. We can see, in the second half of Cilic’s 2018 season, a lingering inability to straightforwardly finish sets and matches. “Is he going to blow it again?” is not a rare or infrequent question raised during many Cilic matches.

Yet, for all the questions Cilic elicits when he fails to make the ATP Finals semifinal round (zero appearances in four attempts), or fails to go deeper in a Masters 1000 than he could or should, this man just keeps coming back with notable resilience.

For much of the rest of the world, American individualism is a very ugly thing — not on a conceptual level (individualism can and does represent personal striving to break free of repression or groupthink), but on an applied level. No one needs to wonder which American person represents the excesses of individualism more than any other.

Tennis, however — even in a team concept — is an individual sport. (You might roll your eyes and groan when you read this, but, for the 9,734th time, the American sport of baseball is so much like tennis in this way: Baseball is a team sport defined by individual confrontations and performances. One pitcher goes up against one hitter.) Even with Davis Cup teammates cheering you on and a coach at courtside offering advice on sitdowns, the player has to go out and execute the game plan.

Few American artists are more associated with individualism than Frank Sinatra, who dominated the nation’s cultural consciousness during the decades-long prime of his career. You could ask, “Why select Sinatra out of various other entertainers or singers as an emblem of American individualism?” The answer: Sinatra’s life on and off stage was equally bold, consumed by a runaway appetite for success and pleasure. That doesn’t make him one of a kind, but Sinatra represented that way of being as well as any prominent American public figure in the 20th century. Moreover, unlike Elvis Presley — who exists on the same plane of global fame and American individualism — Sinatra also sang songs which were anthems of American individualism.

Purely as a reflection of a cultural ideal, no Elvis song from his own lengthy canon can match Sinatra’s tribute to American individual striving, “My Way,” which concludes with the following lyric:

The record shoowwws…

I took the blooowwws…

And did it myyyyyyyyyyyy waaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy…

This is American individualism, defined.

It is also the story of Marin Cilic. He does keep taking some very significant and high-impact punches, the punches which have caused many other careers to wither and die.

Consider, in the history of tennis, just a few examples of players who absorbed devastating losses and never really recovered from them: Nicole Vaidisova at Wimbledon in 2007 against Ana Ivanovic. Marcelo Rios to Dominik Hrbaty at the 1999 French Open. David Nalbandian in the 2006 Australian Open against Marcos Baghdatis.

So many athletes in various sports never recover from a major psychic blow. We’re only human, after all. We are not gods or monsters.

Cilic? He takes some very big, fat roundhouse punches to the jaw… but undeterred, he finds ways to keep coming back in a meaningful way. He has, to be very clear, redefined his career such that he won’t merely be remembered as “The guy who caught fire for one week at the 2014 U.S. Open, muddling through week one but then torching the field in week two with untouchably great tennis.”

No, he has transcended that narrow categorization and its accordingly limited narrative arc.

Cilic is a lot more than that.

The complexity of his career is not a bad thing. If anything, it is a virtue… because if his career had been easy to categorize, the negative probably would have outweighed the positive.

I don’t think you can make that claim about Cilic — not now. Not at the end of 2018.

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